The details of that summer now I no longer remember except, perhaps, like sweet slabs of fresh birthday cake, or also walnuts with the bitter surprise of unremoved shelling bits in the creases. Tastes shocking before swallowed and then forgotten. Cassondra was her name.

“Your hands. They’re so strong, so lively.” She said, half naked.

I was massaging her doughy shoulders, the hard shale bed of muscles beneath the skin, my thumbs torqued down between the blades.

The intricacies of this moment are now, in my memory, gone. Removed maybe. Was she sitting up, rocking forward, as I pressed into her back? Was she lying on my bed, chest down? If so, was I straddling her, my knees bracing either side of her ribcage in a hold? Did I then become erect, as I so often do pinning willing woman down, and could she sense it?

There was no love there between us. There never was. Never. Never enough time for lust to make a chrysalis, to transform and to form it’s inner slink to a butterfly. Never love- I regret that now.

I regret dismissing her so quick. For dismissing the most comforting smell, a lush head of brunette hair, that my nose has ever snuck silent wiffs from. I massage her back, I stoop, I indulge myself in a nose-drunk keg of her smells.

There was never love- I enjoy that now.

She returned from the washroom after swallowing my cum with breath reeking, insultingly, of my hyro-blue Crest mouthwash. How bad did I taste, I wondered, falling asleep ashamed. There was as much love, that is none, as there was engaging conversation. Our walks in the park were a funeral procession of continual bore.

Dating in this town is unavoidable, Chicago, the great lonely snowed in wild cabin. Dating is an institution here, and its participants work their steady way towards becoming the institutionalized, so I have become convinced.

A massage, the blow job, a few rich dinner meals or sun soaked brunch dates, and those many locks of brunette hair that wove ropes around my heart- what else of any friend, any lover, in our minds, will ever really endure?

“Your hands.” She moans. “They’re so strong, so lively.”

No one has ever landed a compliment on me so well.

Cassondra.

You smelled better even than the summer I can no longer prove existed.